Public Service Broadcasting today announce their fifth studio album, The Last Flight, for release on 4 October 2024 via their new label home, SO Recordings. (Pre-order/pre-save here).
The Last Flight concerns the final voyage of America’s pioneering female “aviatrix” Amelia Earhart. In 1922, aged just 25, Earhart flew higher than any woman before her, and in the years that followed she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, setting multiple speed and distance records. In 1937 she announced that she would circumnavigate the globe in her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra aircraft. She crossed the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She left Papua New Guinea to fly to Howland Island in the Central Pacific but never made it, instead ascending to the level of myth reserved for the bravest adventurers.
The Last Flight is similarly full of life-force, evoking adventure, speed and freedom as well as the psychological depths of a unique and admirable individual. Recorded in the band’s southeast London studio, with one day for strings at The Church in north London with the London Contemporary Orchestra, The Last Flight’s guests include Carl Broemel from My Morning Jacket on Eno-esque pedal steel, Berlin voices Andreya Casablanca and EERA who both appeared on Bright Magic, as well as This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables. Listeners may be surprised that the album does not feature original first-person testimony, but dialogue newly recorded by actors, including Kate Graham who read Amelia. This was then sensitively manipulated to give thirties sonic characteristics and distortion. Earhart’s first-hand writings including 1937’s Last Flight was used as a start point, along with the biography East To The Dawn by Susan Butler.
Speaking about the album, the band’s first studio album since 2021’s Bright Magic, J. Willgoose Esq. said “I wanted to do a woman-focused story, because most of the archive we have access to is overwhelmingly male. I was initially drawn in by Earhart’s final fight, rather than the successes that she had, but the more I read the more I became fascinated by her. Her bravery and her aeronautical achievements were extraordinary, but her philosophy and the dignity that she had… she was an outstanding person.
The final flight is the spine of the journey: the story jumps off at different points, and examines different facets of her personality, her relationship with her husband, her attitude to flying, her attitude to existing. She gave herself, I think, less than a 50% chance of survival when she flew the Atlantic alone. To put yourself, willingly, in those situations… I think it says something about that drive at the heart of humanity.
However The Last Flight isn’t doom-laden or covered in grief. There’s adventure, freedom, the joy of being alive. The reason why she wanted to fly was to find the beauty in living – ‘to know the reason why I’m alive, and to feel that every minute.’ The flight did fail, but she was right. Of all the people we’ve written about, I have the deepest respect and admiration for her.”
To coincide with the announcement, the band has shared the album’s first single, “Electra”, a song of soaring machine-funk and a paean to Earhart’s aircraft. Speaking about the track, which was premiered yesterday by Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 6 Music, J. Willgoose Esq. said: "The song is about Amelia Earhart's plane, the marvellously named Electra. To match the name, the vibrancy and the excitement of the aircraft, the track is full of pulsing electronics and interlocking, percussive melody lines, plus pace."
Listen to “Electra” here, and watch the accompanying video, directed and produced by Yes Please Productions, below.
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